The staff inherently has less stats than a MH/OH combo, so it should come out below.

Due to the requirements of the questline, we should see the first upgraded ones in 6 weeks.

The staff actually has more secondary stats then the MH/OH combo. Assuming a Smooth Sun's Radiance in both Sha touched weapon's prismatic sockets, 2133 Haste/Crit/Spirit for the staff vs. 2076 Haste/Crit/Spirit for the Empress Mace/Tornado OH. The mace/oh also has a lot of hit (796) vs. none for the Staff so you would need to play with the reforging to make sure that it doesn't yield to anything funny.

You gain 160 int for the off hand enchant, that compared to the 77 extra secondary stats should give the edge to MH/OH combo, but what it does to reforging could be impactful.

Edit: Actually the gain from the secondary stats would be higher after upgrading twice, and obviously the 160 int would remain the same. It would prolly be somewhere around 120 more Haste/Crit,

I get 108593.06 DPS with the heroic, no-upgrade Jin'ya, Orb of the Waterspeaker (including +320 crit gem), compared to 109893.47 DPS with Kri'tak. So the staff is still a loss, and wont improve significantly enough with the two upgrades.

Comparing H Kri'tak and H Jin'ya, with both upgraded twice:

Kri'tak vs. Jin'ya

Int: 139 vs. 0C/H/S: 0 vs. 62

Since Int is roughly worth double crit in the H BiS list, the MH/OH combo is the clear winner. As to your reforging comment: I haven't fiddled with Kri'tak/Tornado with everything upgraded yet, so I can't say definitively. I doubt the staff will pull ahead, though.

Daxxarri: "As I mentioned, we've been investigating the possibility of altering the Real PPM system to allow double procs. It hadn't been done previously due to technical challenges, but we found a solution much faster than expected, and we're currently working on a hotfix to allow Real PPM enchantments to proc separately per weapon.

Yes, this means that if everything goes smoothly, you'll soon be able to have two simultaneous Dancing Steel procs, or (very rarely) six simultaneous Windsong procs."

29th Nov Hotfix:
Item Enhancements

Enchantments using the Real PPM system will now generate two buffs simultaneously, rather than simply refreshing the duration of an existing effect.

Does this cement Windsong as best enchant for boomkins? Since we don't dual wield there is no chance we would get double Jade Spirit proc (given the icd), even with the new system.

This whole thread makes me sad with people over valuing haste for pure patchwerk scenarios that don't exist.

We aren't overvaluing haste at all. In this gear one can reach the 8089 bp while still having the majority of reforges/gems going to more Crit. There's no reason to blatantly try to ignore the bp when it's so easily attained. Item Upgrading will make it even easier so I don't see how you could say haste is overvalued in making this BiS list.

You're acting as if we are using Quick Gems in every socket and reforing Crit --> Haste on numerous pieces to reach some absurdly high bp.

We aren't overvaluing haste at all. In this gear one can reach the 8089 bp while still having the majority of reforges/gems going to more Crit. There's no reason to blatantly try to ignore the bp when it's so easily attained. Item Upgrading will make it even easier so I don't see how you could say haste is overvalued in making this BiS list.

You're acting as if we are using Quick Gems in every socket and reforing Crit --> Haste on numerous pieces to reach some absurdly high bp.

Just a little under 2%, which is far less than the 6-8% I've seen people throwing around on other forums.

Hypothetically, if we were able to upgrade every piece of BiS gear, we would gain (passively) 457 haste just from the pieces that have it innately (ignoring reforges, which would boost it up another 50-70 points). This means, instead of having to lose 1080 crit, you're down to 623 crit, a little over 1%. I realise the numbers we have for upgrades are still a bit touchy, but these numbers are good enough for an estimate.

Side-note: I've been fiddling with a 3706 haste breakpoint with full crit reforging/gemming, and the highest DPS I can get to is 109661.11 DPS, around 320 lower than the current set-up. It's important to note, though, that both the crit and 8089 haste breakpoint BiS lists are using Dream of Cenarius as the L90 talent. Looking at this tier, I'm really tempted to re-evaluate the BiS list with NV as the talent of choice for fights with a damage multiplier, and HotW for all else - in fact, NV might pull ahead of HotW if combined well with all other cooldowns + hero/pot. I'll need to go over it first though, so it may take a few days for reassessment.

I get 108593.06 DPS with the heroic, no-upgrade Jin'ya, Orb of the Waterspeaker (including +320 crit gem), compared to 109893.47 DPS with Kri'tak. So the staff is still a loss, and wont improve significantly enough with the two upgrades.

Comparing H Kri'tak and H Jin'ya, with both upgraded twice:

Kri'tak vs. Jin'ya

Int: 139 vs. 0C/H/S: 0 vs. 62

Since Int is roughly worth double crit in the H BiS list, the MH/OH combo is the clear winner. As to your reforging comment: I haven't fiddled with Kri'tak/Tornado with everything upgraded yet, so I can't say definitively. I doubt the staff will pull ahead, though.

Hi Slippy, i havent posted on this forum yet, but i do try to read it as often as possible since its very helpful. Now i was curious, this bis weapon scenario includes legendary gem? I know crit is nice but surely the int gain from the 500 gem is going to change the weights.

I apologise if i have missed reading somewhere but 500 int > 320 crit unless i am mistaken.

Thanks. Rage.

Edit: Sorry i just read about the extra socket, so my post can be disreguarded. Sorry

I think the tittle of this topic needs some adjusting to prevent alot of these arguements. This is about single target dummy dps, in practice the majority of the fights arent single target dummy fights so another setup(heavy crit with an argueable ammount of haste) will be "BiS" in practice.

Alright, so I've gone and re-done the T14H BiS list to factor in the following changes:

In light of how this tier is playing out, I've decided to change the baseline T90 talent from Dream of Cenarius to Nature's Vigil. We were expecting Dream of Cenarius to be the outright best talent during the beta once 4-pc T14 has been achieved, but now that practicality has set in and more and more fights have damage modifiers and Nature's Vigil stacks well with raid/personal cooldowns, it pulls ahead on paper and with reasoning.

A lot of discussion has been about whether or not the 8089 haste breakpoint is worth reaching or not. For a long time, single-target damage from WrathCalcs favoured DoC and the haste breakpoint; now that I've gone and tried to re-do the BiS list with Nature's Vigil, a crit-based build that does not reach the haste breakpoint maths out to be better than the traditional haste breakpoint build. For multi-dotting and movement fights, the crit-based build was already the victor, so what this really means is that Nature's Vigil and a crit build is better for single and multi-target fights (barring Mel'jarak where it looks like Hurricane spam is best for phase 1).

With these changes in mind, I did a short comparison between the normal haste build, the crit build with current gear, and the crit build with hat/pants swapped in terms of tier/off-piece. This is what I came up with:

DPS build w/

DoC

HotW

NV

8089 haste BP (traditional)

109993.47

107312.79

106557.45

crit with current gear

108685.70

107317.41

106598.26

crit with hat/pants swap

109701.20

108428.84

107556.15

You can see here that the traditional haste breakpoint build with Dream of Cenarius is the highest of the 9 options, which is what we were basing the old BiS list off of. By forcing NV to be the default choice for talent, the best option is a hat/pants swap with crit reforging, and note that this is evaluated for a single-target fight. This method will shine even more in multi-dotting, and thus, everyone is happy.

I'll update the OP with the changes, but I'll also post the new BiS list here for reference:

The Potent Vermilion Onyx used in the pants is because 1 int > 2 crit for around 60 int, then it dips below. Since we have way too much spirit on our gear overall, it's smarter to put the int/crit gem in the red socket instead of crit/exp, as the extra hit is unavoidable at this point. Extra hit becomes haste anyway, which is significantly below crit.

Kri'tak with the prismatic socket, which is now confirmed via Eye of the Black Prince, is about 500 DPS ahead of Regail's because of the 320 crit you can get for free.

The 19 hit under cap is easily remedied with at least one valor point upgrade, and that's completely viable.

This list was evaluated without any upgrades. The items will not change. Gems/reforges will most likely be the only difference, and you'll need to assess that yourself as you upgrade pieces.

Nature's Vigil is underrated on paper. In reality, you stack it best with other cooldowns and it pulls ahead of Heart of the Wild or Dream of Cenarius.

Please feel free to critique this list to the best of your abilities, as I've only spent a few hours looking over this and optimising. Hopefully this puts to rest the haste breakpoint vs. full crit arguments, as this tentatively proves (for the moment) a full crit method is significantly better for both single- and multi-target fights.

---------- Post added 2012-12-07 at 03:57 PM ----------

Originally Posted by Joeri2

This is about single target dummy dps, in practice the majority of the fights arent single target dummy fights so another setup(heavy crit with an argueable ammount of haste) will be "BiS" in practice.

At the time of creation, this thread was made with the ideology in mind that the haste breakpoint was better for multi-target fights, as well as single-target. Now that we've got a better foot into Pandaria, I've gone and re-evaluated the list to incorporate what is generally accepted as the "best" strategy. The only problem with this notion was that there was no maths to back it up - merely small, clustered pieces of evidence from World of Logs detailing the top boomkins on some fights. That's not a definitive answer to the question of "what's best?" but does lead people in a good direction.

Thus, I decided to go over the numbers again with WrathCalcs and see what I could do. In fact, I found even for single-target fights, crit/NV was the best combo, barring DoC as an option because of the reality of fights in T14.

Hopefully these results clear things up for everyone, and we start to see more evidence to support this conjecture.